> The entrance fee to a computer science career is membership in geek culture, and that’s way too restrictive. If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it.
I find this almost bigoted and hateful. Like the author wants geeks to change their behaviour, to enforce some sort of thought police. For us all to become bland, souless replicas of average joe. So we've no place to fit in anymore.
No thanks.
I wonder if they'll ever do the same study of why there are so few male hairdressers or nurses. Or perhaps so few female plumbers. Same conclusions I imagine. And will the suggest forcing hairdressers to stop reading magazines and talking makeup too?
Dude, have you talked to hairdressers? I have. When I was younger I'd be surprised at how much they were comfortable talking about. We'd talk about cinema and literature and politics and they'd have an opinion about everything. It struck me how these people, who I'd once thought were emptyheaded, were actually smart, well-balanced people who just happened to love their occupation. Then it made me realize that perhaps I was the emptyheaded one for believing in the idea of the "average joe".
Now I am a little bit older — not much older, mind you — and I've learned how stupid it is to believe that anybody could be at all considered average. In various positions I've talked to a slew of people I'd once have dismissed for their commonality. I don't think I've ever met somebody who I'd call stupid. A lot of them you'd think are stupid until you talk to them and realize they've just got a few stupid beliefs ingrained in them and beyond that are as bright as anybody. The more people you meet, the more you realize how stupid it is to sequester yourself away in an ivory tower or a dank basement, to assume that you're somehow an elite being who other people simply cannot understand.
Hell, that's why I became a writer. I learned that to understand others, I had to learn how others understood me.
I can't speak for anyone else, obviously, but I sequester myself away in a dark basement because I enjoy it, not out of some idiot notion that I'm smarter than other people.
It's not that other people are stupider than me; it's that other people aren't me. I am under the obligation to act the way they act in the same way that I am under the obligation to have the same favourite colour as them. That is to say, I am under no such obligation. I happen to enjoy different things than they do; is it any surprise that I act differently, then?
Every time I get my haircut. When did I mention intelligence? This is all about groups. Talk about attacking a straw doll.
I have no interest in the latest winner of strictly come dancing, big brother, Susan Boyle's latest single. I don't like grime, r & b. I think that the Sun newspaper is little more than compost.
It's to do with a social group. It's to do with interests. We see extremes of this in high school (pg has a great essay on this).
My point was that the author is singling out one 'clique' for their double-think experiment.
It doesn't matter if hairdressers are smart well-balanced people for the point of the original study to apply to them.
If most people think hairdressers are ditzes, then that will turn people off from becoming a hairdresser.
Just like if most programmers are fairly normal, well-balanced people doesn't matter. What matters is what a teenager trying to decide what to do with their lives thinks a programmer/hairdresser/any other job "looks like"
If it's your true vocation, the thing you're so passionate about that you must do it, nothing so trivial as what strangers might think is going to dissuade you. Anything else merely keeps a roof over your head while wasting your time, so it doesn't really matter what you settle for.
While I agree, I can't for the life of me figure out where you stand in this whole debate. What you said seems to suggest that you don't think geeks need to change, because those who truly want to work in CS will anyway... but you seemed to write that as some sort of rebuttal to someone who was asserting that very thing.
Hairdressers spend their lives putting people at ease by talking to them about whatever they want to talk about. There is no wonder that the profession attracts people who like talking about a wide variety of things.
Honestly, I think they are just better at pretending to be interested and letting you speak. People tend to think a conversation was great if the other person gives them positive feedback. My girlfriend is a hairdresser and she does this quite well, and she doesn't care about at least 75% of her conversations, but you'd never know it as a client.
I find this almost bigoted and hateful. Like the author wants geeks to change their behaviour, to enforce some sort of thought police. For us all to become bland, souless replicas of average joe. So we've no place to fit in anymore.
No thanks.
I wonder if they'll ever do the same study of why there are so few male hairdressers or nurses. Or perhaps so few female plumbers. Same conclusions I imagine. And will the suggest forcing hairdressers to stop reading magazines and talking makeup too?